Procol Harlum

Hommage Symphonique is an album of progressive rock covers recorded by master keyboardist Erik Norlander along with the virtuoso band of Gregg Bissonette, Don Schiff and Mark McCrite with Kelly Keeling handling all of the vocal duties. Erik also employed a small ensemble of acoustic instruments featuring Jon Pappenbrook (trumpets flugelhorn), Eric Jorgensen (trombones), Mike Alvarez (cello) and David Schiff (woodwinds). David is the brother of Don Schiff, and in addition to Don's NS/Stick work on the album, he also fills out the acoustic string ensemble with the new Bowed Guitar instrument. Erik's choice of covers reflects his own broad musical taste, performing songs originally recorded by ELP, ELO, Yes, Rick Wakeman, King Crimson, Procol Harum and Jethro Tull and Chuck Mangione…

Previous Grapefruit genre anthologies have shown how the various strands of British psychedelia developed tangentially in subsequent years: I’m A Freak Baby observed how the blues-based, harder-edged element of the genre gradually morphed into hard rock/proto-metal, Dust On The Nettles examined the countercultural psychedelic folk movement, while Come Join My Orchestra looked at the post-“Penny Lane” baroque pop sound. Our latest attempt to document the British psychedelic scene’s subsequent family tree, Lullabies For Catatonics charts the journey without maps that was fearlessly undertaken in the late Sixties and early Seventies by the more cerebral elements of the underground, inspired by everyone from Bartok, Bach and The Beatles to Dada, Dali and the Pop Art movement. Suddenly pop music was no longer restricted to moon-in-June lyrics and traditional song structures. Instead, it embraced the abstract, the discordant and the surreal as pop became rock, and rock became Art.